Don’t Forget To Spread Your Wings

Hello everyone, hows your weekend been so far?

If you visited yesterday (or early this morning) you may have caught the site in Maintenance Mode while I made a few changes and updates that were long overdue.  I had been putting them off due to lack of time and a few other reasons, but yesterday was the day it all got done!  If you are the sort of person who notices such things, you might have noticed that the blog address has changed from /blog to my main domain, or you may not have noticed this as I had a redirect in place.  Believe it or this site predates all social media, was created in the same year as Youtube and at the time WordPress was at around version 1.5 and was nowhere near as comprehensive as it is now, so when I installed my site it had a static home page and then other things were installed in separate folders, like the blog, the forum, the gallery and so on, to link to the home page.

Things moved on over the years but I left the blog in its own folder and just redirected traffic there, but it irritated me every time I saw the longer URL and always had plans to move it when I got the chance.  These things can be tricky or they can go smoothly; with older sites, it can be tricky as a lot has changed over the years since 2005 and there can be unexpected hiccups.  However, I moved it yesterday with no problems and at the same time, I fixed the issue with the emojis not displaying 🙂 <— see?  And I also upgraded PHP to the latest version, and while I was there I also moved our book group to a secure site (wasn’t possible before) and then did a quick redesign of the home page to something less extra lol. Behind the scenes I cleaned up old plugins and pages and other stuff that was just taking up space – why did I have 80 unused pages?  I don’t know but like I said, old site and things tend to accumulate over the years – or I am just a digital hoarder lol.  The one remaining issue is to clean up the image library as that is taking up way too much space but that can be done as and when and won’t require the site to be in maintenance mode.

Oh and, here’s what I could see through my window as I was working on the site last night. This was 9.45pm and the sun was still setting and turning the clouds pink. We have a couple of weeks before the Solstice so it will probably get to around 11pm before it starts getting dark and then starts getting light again around 2-3am.  Further north will have even longer daylight hours and it reminds me of my trip to the Hebrides a few years ago, which was also in June.

So now all the technical stuff is done, let’s get back to the fun stuff!  This month, Country View Challenges are celebrating their 100th challenge and big congratulations to one of my favourite challenges!  This month the challenge is to feature the number 100 somewhere on your project and also to be inspired by one of the DT projects.  What a fun challenge!

For my first entry (yes there is a second one coming) I created an art journal page which was inspired by the colour of the background and the stamp set used by Rachel on her card.

I chose this one because I love turquoise/teal so of course I was drawn to this one, plus I have this stamp set and I liked the little round text stamps used as zeros.

I don’t have the new Distress colours so I improvised by using some watered down acrylic ink in a spray bottle to create a similar sprayed background.

To change things up a bit and make mine different, I also used this Finnabair stencil and some Paperartsy Fresco paint to add lots of circles to the background.

Then I used the round stamps and some Versafine Clair ink to stamp the 00s for the 100s as Rachel had done on her card.

I used a 1 numeral stamp from a Tim Holtz stamp set (Worn Text?) to make the 00s into 100s, then used some black Stazon to stamp the focal point woman (Finnabair) and lots of butterflies across the page. I used three different sizes of butterflies since this is an journal page so there was more room to play with and space to fill.

I used a gold pen to outline the 100 numbers…

And I used gold ink to paint around the edge of my page, splatter the background and paint the butterflies.

When I think of 100 or centenary, I always think “gold” for some reason so I felt like I had to add some to the page.  And now here’s a look at the finished page…

It was very quick and fun to do.  Hope you enjoyed the journey!  Let me know what you think in the comments.  As always, thanks for reading!

Ingredients

watercolour paper, my usual journal, Finnabair stamps, Stazon black ink, Liquitex teal and gold acrylic ink, Tim Holtz stamp (1), Paperartsy Fresco paint – Aquamarine, Finnabair bubbles stencil, gold pen,

Challenges

Art Journal Journey – Butterflies – June Challenge

Country View Challenges – 100 Challenges – inspired by DT make by Rachel (card)
Try it on Tuesday – Butterflies – challenge starting 25th May

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